Well, Guild Wars 2, if you don't know, is the sequel to ArenaNet's game Guild Wars.
And it seems the sequel is focusing on different aspects of the genre than most MMO's. For one, their will be no "quests" as such (as in, no people with an icon over their head to go talk to, kill ten rats and return to) instead having "events" which happen dynamically based on other happenings in the world, (Centaurs raid a village, you can help defend it or ignore it, if you attempt to help and fail you still get rewarded, just not as much as for succeeding, and if you fail you can try to take back the village, and so on).
And most importantly, and the thing I want to discuss, your character's "Personal Story" You fill out a brief biography for your character at creation, and then there are points where you make important decisions throughout the game, which affects your motives for defeating the big bad, Zhaitan. Among other things.
So, thoughts. Will this work? Will it add the missing "RPG element" that other MMO's seem to lack?

I guess it will depend on the amount of random events and the viarity of them, I mean coming accross a town being raided and lending a hand sounds awesome, but if you have to do it 50times in different places then its not much different then the standard mmo.
I think the main problem with most mmos is they can never keep the content coming faster then the players can complete it or at least at a decent rate.
I haven't really looked into this game much though as I didn't really enjoy the first one, knowing that they will be trying something like this makes me want to take a better look into it now.

The first Guild Wars succeeded in placing emphasis on those areas as well. The difference is in preference, really...
The more they concentrate on putting you in the Guild Wars story, the more streamlined the MMO becomes, and some would argue that it results in less openness. On the other hand, the story becomes much more fleshed-out and interesting, and helps to immerse you in a living and breathing situation, and less in a town with a bunch of people without much in common.
I think that Guild Wars 2 is definitely turning the trend in the right direction, though. I'm hoping there may be similar aspects to Bioware's foray into the MMO genre as well.

One of the articles about the events on their site, or maybe one of their recent interviews mentions "hidden" event chains. The one they mentioned involved killing a bunch of deer in the forest just because you can could lead to nearby monsters that usually eat the deer go and attack the nearby village instead. Another example involved earning the trust of the Skritt (rat-people) which would lead to you being able to visit their town, at least until the king dies at which point they kick you out. They are claiming roughly 3 times the events that normal MMO's have in quests, along with a branching personal story and instanced dungeons.
Not quite, Guild Wars was instanced entirely, it still had traditional quests, and the story was linear.